My Birchbox experience

My Birchbox experience

Ok so back at the end of July after weeks of going back and forth about signing up to a Beauty Subscription Box I decided to sign up to Birchbox. To be honest their page kept coming up on my Facebook suggestions so when I saw they were doing a 2 for 1 deal on their boxes to celebrate Birchbox now being available to Irish customers I felt it was a sign!! (Any excuse lol!!)

The deal they were offering at the time was if you signed up before the end of July you got June and July’s box for the price of one month, happy days especially because firstly, they were doing a collaboration with Millie Mackintosh in July’s box and you got an exclusive colour Ultra Gloss Lip Pencil by LOC and secondly you got to choose a full size John Frieda product of your choice too which was pretty much worth the price of one months subscription alone. In retrospect it all did seem to be too good to be true and turns out I wasn’t wrong!!

My first issue with them is communication, there just isn’t any, you sign up and you hear nothing and as a consumer I find that incredibly annoying. After hearing absolutely nothing for nearly a week I sent them an email just to make sure that my order had been successful and that I would indeed be getting both June and July’s box as per the deal, 5 DAYS LATER I got a response and what was even worse than having to wait that long was the fact that the response told me that there had been a delay and my AUGUST box had been sent out the day before and should be with me shortly……..Actual facepalm!! I waited for five days to get a response to a question I didn’t ask, awesome!!

On the 11th of August my August Birchbox arrived which I suppose was at least acknowledgement that I was an actual customer of theirs. The contents of the bag were decent enough, I was impressed with the sizes of some of the products included and I felt that I would use most of them. I particularly liked the “Marcelle” Mulberry eyeliner that came in the bag, it is such a beautiful colour.

August Birchbox

In the meantime I had responded to the very “helpful” first email to ask for an answer to my actual question and again was hearing nothing back. I tried contacting Birchbox via Twitter and Facebook Messenger too to try and get a response. Twitter didn’t work but I did however get a response through Facebook Messenger but unfortunately I had messaged the wrong account a got through to Birchbox US instead of UK. This was to be the only time that I experienced efficient customer orientated service from Birchbox. I dealt with Brent who was so helpful who actually reached out to the UK team on my behalf to try and get somebody to return my email. I was incredibly grateful to him for his help as almost immediately after he contacted them I finally got a response back to say the other two boxes were on their way.

Fast forward maybe four days and there they were, finally my two boxes from Birchbox, I was so excited, finally I was going to get what I ordered….WRONG!!! I opened the package and inside was March and July’s Birchboxes. You can imagine my frustration by now, I couldn’t believe that after all of the hassle I had already been through now my order was wrong. I was even more frustrated when I opened the March box, it was actually a disgrace that they sent the contents of that box to anybody, I was fuming!!

The horror that was March’s Birchbox, check out the hair bobbles

The only bit of light at the end of the tunnel was the fact that July’s box was every bit as good as I had hoped it would be and I got my full size John Frieda 7 Day Volume In-Shower Treatment too. I instantly contacted Birchbox on Twitter again, numerous times and I sent another email too but I obviously knew at that point what was going to be ahead of me trying to get somebody to contact me back.

At least July’s box was fab!!

Three days and several tweets later I finally got a response to my email to say there must have been a mistake (really!!?!?) and they’d send a June box out to me that day. At no point during this entire experience did anybody offer any apology for the ridiculously poor customer service I received, nobody seemed to be interested to be honest other than that lovely guy in Birchbox US who helped me out.

Happy with the June box when it finally arrived!!

It was at that point I decided to cancel my subscription with immediate effect. What bothered me most of all is that I had shared this “deal” with my blog readers via my Facebook page and I knew for a fact that some of them had signed up for the subscription too. This made me feel so awful if they had experienced something similar, I felt like it was my fault.

I’m hoping somebody at Birchbox might actually read this and put something in place so nobody else has to deal with such overwhelmingly bad customer service in future. Have you tried Birchbox or any other beauty subscription boxes? How has your experience been? I’d really love to hear!!